Hacker News: kev6168

New comment by kev6168 in "Rails 6: B-Sides and Rarities"

kev6168 — Thu, 02 May 2019 09:13:42 +0000

Interesting. What server side tech stacks are often used by young developers in the recent hackathon? Are there a few dominant ones or many choices?

New comment by kev6168 in "Programming language ray tracing benchmarks project"

kev6168 — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 18:30:38 +0000

I am surprised PyPy has such a huge lead over Python.

    $ time python pyrb.py 

    real    348m35.965s
    user    345m51.776s
    sys     0m22.880s

    $ time pypy pyrb.py

    real    14m2.406s
    user    13m55.292s
    sys     0m1.416s

New comment by kev6168 in "Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)"

kev6168 — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 16:17:00 +0000

I think you are correct that '0748' is not a very serious/forceful phrase. Probably only a lighthearted slang used by young netizens in China.

New comment by kev6168 in "Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)"

kev6168 — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 16:06:56 +0000

yeah, my default search engine is bing. But sometimes you have the feeling it probably has less stuff in its database than what baidu has crawled and collected. Out of habit I rarely use 360 or sogou so I don't know how they fair compared to baidu or bing.

New comment by kev6168 in "Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs (2014)"

kev6168 — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 14:18:29 +0000

Another reason I think is in China the search engines have been terrible since the beginning. For example even if your search query is as specific as "ACME inc. of AAA city in BBB province" , it would be your lucky day if the first two result pages have that company's web site. What you get mostly are paid ads and shitty seo stuff. It's been like this to this day.

So not being able to rely on search, people have to memorize companies' urls, to type them into address bar and pass along to others the actual url string. Internet companies are forced to display them predominantly in ads. So a domain name that is cute/easy(often costing ridiculus amount) is all that more important in China than elsewhere.

Google please come back, it will be a net gain for humanity.

New comment by kev6168 in " Byju’s buys Osmo for $120M to add blended learning to its education business"

kev6168 — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 03:04:26 +0000

The second link is a referral shopping page without any information about the company. This url also appears on their crunchbase page. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kaishu-jianggushi#se...

New comment by kev6168 in "Firefox 64 Released"

kev6168 — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 08:52:12 +0000

What happened between Firefox 61 and Firefox 63 ? 61 (and the versions before that) occasionally freeze or crashed on my old laptop (win7, 32bit), but just yesterday I installed 63, it runs very fast, feels very stable, has had no problem at all so far.

Just want to say thank you to the developers of Firefox. Thank you for all the hard work to continue to improve a great product.

New comment by kev6168 in "Haskell to Perl 6"

kev6168 — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 14:52:25 +0000

Thanks for the recommendations.

One liners are fun, and life-saving. I am curious about this aspect compared to Perl 5. With Perl 6's new syntax and language features, can we still easily [ab]use one liners for fun and profit?

New comment by kev6168 in "Haskell to Perl 6"

kev6168 — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 11:31:03 +0000

It was tongue in cheek, haha... I was only frustrated by my own inability to get the hang of Perl 6. As an old casual fan of Perl, I still want to take another shot at learning it very much.

New comment by kev6168 in "Haskell to Perl 6"

kev6168 — Sat, 08 Dec 2018 05:23:33 +0000

Perl 6 is for people who are very smart and have a great spirit in seeking and having fun in programming, I really admire that. That's my thought after two failed attempts (each lasted about two days) to learn it in 2012 and 2014. I felt the use of sigils, syntax oddities and the cleverness were beyond my ability to master the language. I should mention in 1998 I used (modified it a little bit) Selena Sol's shopping cart script. Since then I have only written a few small Perl 5 scripts, am not familiar with recent development. To learn Perl 6 today, what kind of practice projects/applications, or approaches, one can use?

New comment by kev6168 in "Hiroshima (1946)"

kev6168 — Tue, 27 Nov 2018 10:48:32 +0000

I have often thought about this (why didn't they drop the bombs at a few villages not very far from Tokyo to make the point?). Today I found in this thread and the 2016 discusssion two good(I think) reasons, one was to race against Stalin's possible invasion of Japan, another was to clearly showcase the power of the US to the _world_, not merely to the Japanese, in preparation for the ensuring cold war.

New comment by kev6168 in "Turn Vim into Excel: Tips for Editing Tabular Data (2013)"

kev6168 — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 16:12:38 +0000

I have tried previously to switch from vim to other editors (IDEA and sublime text). It felt painful. But this time (to VS Code) it has been smooth so far. I think it might be the result of me forcing myself to forget about the vim way completely. For example I have been deliberately using mouse more often, and supressing the thoughts and longing of registers and macros etc. I am not a vim power user to begin with so It's not that difficult. Losing vim power but gaining the benefits of VS code, so far so good.

New comment by kev6168 in "Turn Vim into Excel: Tips for Editing Tabular Data (2013)"

kev6168 — Sat, 10 Nov 2018 13:58:40 +0000

It's VS Code + the vscodevim extension for me lately and it's been great. I am not a first-rate Vim user anyway, so the convenience and ecosystem of VS Code won me over easily.

New comment by kev6168 in "Bytedance said to be valued at over $75B in new round"

kev6168 — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 17:45:43 +0000

haha true. I watched 10 days non-stop of cute cats on Douyin, then I tried to find other types, but found very lacking.

New comment by kev6168 in "Bytedance said to be valued at over $75B in new round"

kev6168 — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 17:43:38 +0000

I agree, though Instagram is images based with plenty of sources for good contents (photos created by shopping web site, the makers of those products, etc.), but videos are not as plentyful.

New comment by kev6168 in "Bytedance said to be valued at over $75B in new round"

kev6168 — Fri, 28 Sep 2018 17:16:52 +0000

My opinion on the long term potential of China's short video platforms has changed completely in the last three months. Used to be high on it, but now I think it's useful but not to this hyped up level, not even close.

The majority of videos on Douyin belong to one of these three categories, 1, girls putting on crazy amount of makeup staring at the camera or lip syncing. The platforms's software are often used to make the eyes larger and legs longer, to ridiculous degree. 2, cats, dogs and other pets, 3, tens of thousands of people imparting universal wisdom to you on how to get rich quickly, become a skillful pickup artist or life guru, etc.

Other than these three types, there are very little left. Of course you may find it differently. But IMO shortage of quality content will be a big problem going forwad for these platforms. In general most people in every country don't have the skill to produce videos of good quality, coupled with China's tight control on what can be shown, it's becoming suffocating for creativity. For example comedies or poignant news commentaries are very rare. A lack of respect for intellectual rights is still a problem in China, endless copying and pasting and boring and fake stuff. Anyway, content shortage is a problem everywhere, but it's just terribly bad in China.

Also, unlike say Facebook or Wechat, these video platforms lack the relationships between users that keep people around. Sure you can leave messages on Douyin but there are basically zero long term interactions going on. People on Douyin always tell others to meet at Wechat or Weibo or other places. Douyin is simply not made for social networking, and I don't see it can change that.

New comment by kev6168 in "Virtual Environments Demystified"

kev6168 — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 05:29:04 +0000

It does demystify it when you show the steps to create an virtual env by hand. Very helpful.

New comment by kev6168 in "The Great Chinese Art Heist"

kev6168 — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 17:14:27 +0000

But these European museums for the past hundred years have been like this, "hey folks, look here, in the past we invaded other countries, burnt down their houses, plundered their stuff. It's wrong, OK! Now with that out of the way, here are our loot, everybody come in to take a look. Enjoy!" It's facinating.

New comment by kev6168 in "The Great Chinese Art Heist"

kev6168 — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 16:42:14 +0000

I have been to many major memuems in China and I don't remember seeing large sections of precious artifacts from the populations you mentioned. Can you name some of them? Also technically they are all within one country, it's different from what we are talk about.

New comment by kev6168 in "The Great Chinese Art Heist"

kev6168 — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 16:34:34 +0000

Agreed. During the 1950s/60s/70s the amount of precious art and historic artifacts lost is just staggering, it makes one sick everytime thinking about it.